Team room software is becoming increasingly popular as a tool for information sharing and collaboration among members of teams. Existing team room systems, such as Lotus QuickPlace, IBM® Workplace Team Collaboration™ team spaces, Groove Workspace, Documentum eRoom, and Microsoft SharePoint Team Services, allow for the creation of virtual project team shared “areas” or “workspaces” that support team communication, coordination, and collaboration. These shared work spaces typically give team members a centralized place where they can store, organize, and retrieve resources and artifacts relating to the team's project, e.g. code files, designs, project documentation, presentations, schedules, and sometimes applications. In addition, team rooms typically support interactive discussion among members, allowing them to chat or otherwise communicate about a project, and solve project issues.
Generally, team rooms are secure areas: Access to their resources and artifacts is restricted to users who have been made members of (i.e. given permission to access) the team room. As project participants join and leave projects, they are added to, or removed from, membership in the project's team room. While keeping team rooms secure is important, this “all-or-nothing” approach to team room membership can be problematic. For example, suppose a team wishes to selectively share some of the team room's contents with an outside person or an external team. In existing systems, non-members can be granted access to the team room, but only by making them members, which exposes all of the team room's contents. The team that created and “owns” the team room content may find this very undesirable, especially since the team room's content, including discussions, may have been created with the understanding that it would be private to the team. Alternative existing solutions involve sending external parties selected content via electronic mail (“email”), or publishing selected content via an RSS (“RDF Site Summary”) feed. With either of these techniques, however, the recipients generally cannot see the team room information with the same immediacy as team room members present in the originating team rooms. Moreover, since email and RSS are primarily polling-based technologies, users external to the team room can only see new team room information provided through these techniques when they choose to check their email or read their RSS feeds. In addition, non-members may wish to discuss, or even contribute to, the team room content sent to them. However, existing team rooms provide no technique for outsiders to selectively contribute to or discuss the content they may be forwarded; outsiders must use mechanisms outside the team room, such as email, or must obtain full-fledged team membership, which may be undesirable in some cases.
For the above reasons and others, it would be desirable to have a new system for sharing the contents of a team room with persons that are not members of the team room. The system should allow for selective sharing of the team room contents with non-members, and enable non-members to contribute to and/or discuss the team room contents that is exposed to them, while not requiring exposure of the entire team room contents to non-members.